If I can make one person feel this, I’m golden.

I can’t stop, won’t stop, don’t want to stop.

Here’s the feeling I had today. If I can give this feeling to someone else, I have succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. Oh, then I’ll keep doing it.

We were at the archery practice area where we’re staying outside of Marrakesh, Morocco in the high desert. I sat in the dirt as my two boys took the archery lesson. I had done it with them the day before and they wanted to do it again, but I didn’t really need to. What I really wanted to do was just read a few more pages of my book.

I’m reading one of my all-time favorite books for what might be the third time–Kane and Abel, by Jeffrey Archer. I can’t remember how many times I’ve read it because it was so long ago, but I do remember that I couldn’t put it down then and I can’t put it down now.

All I Want

I watched my boys shoot and as they went to collect the arrows, I dug into just a few more paragraphs of the book on my lap. William Kane was invited to the reading of the last will and testament of Charles Lester’s, the father of his best friend and chairman of a New York bank. The division of all of the assets is finished, but there was no mention of William. He is slightly surprised, but not disappointed. He was hoping for maybe just a memento of his best friend’s life, taken away recently by disease.

Just as the man reading the will says that there are just a few more items, my boys are done with archery. I talk with them and my wife and it’s clear we have to leave. “But the will is about to be read,” I plead. They look at me like I’m a little crazy, but only a little because they know I haven’t been able to put this book down our entire vacation. I read in line to get on the airplane, I read while we’re standing in the aisle waiting to put my bag in the overhead bins, I read as the stewardess explaining about the overhead bins. And I read while sitting in the dirt in the desert in Morocco. But now archery practice is over and I have to get up.

“I just need a few more pages,” I try to make it sound important and quick. “I’ll catch up with you,” I say and don’t exactly phrase it as a question or even something that can be discussed and they, finally, leave me alone and I can get back to my book.

This is the feeling I will instill in people.

It’s simple. They can’t put it down. There are even things they need to do, but they don’t want to do them because they would rather read my story. But Jeffrey Archer is a magician. He has me going the whole book. I’m on page 300-something and it’s been this way the whole ride. How does he keep up the momentum? How can he keep building and ascending and hook me line and sinker?

I finish the few pages and stand up and smile to myself as this is what makes me happy. Not only that Jeffrey Archer can do this to me, but that I also know what was in the rest of the will and that it hits me that this is an example of a feeling that I want people to have when they read my work.